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GRASPING THE NUCLEAR EQUATION
Defense&Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy. September 2000
 Few things excite a strategist or analyst more than possessing a rare and elusive knowledge, or receiving the epiphany which rolls back the darkness of the past. The newly-published masterpiece, Strategic Nuclear Forces, Volume I of the XXI Century Encyclopedia: Russia's Arms and Technologies, is such a revelation. It gives a broad and deep base of clear understanding of what made, and what makes, Russia's strategic significance remain profound in the current global environment.
Strategic Nuclear Forces is the first of a series of planned volumes on Russian defense systems and capabilities, and it was significant that the publishers chose to tackle strategic nuclear systems as their introduction. The book provides material never before published in the open media, and much of the content of the book will cause intelligence services to update their classified databases on Russian systems.
Many analysts will be familiar with the encyclopedic series entitled Russia's Arms Catalog, published in 1996-97, under the editorial direction of Nikolai Spassky, who now oversees the new series, albeit with a different publishing house. Strategic Nuclear Forces shows a number of things: firstly, that the original encyclopedic series on Russian arms did not represent an aberration in the system. The Russian defense establishment has truly embraced a public debate and education on military issues. And secondly, that Nikolai Spassky and his team have been able to improve even on their 1996-97 work to produce a book of great value to the international strategic community.
Strategic Nuclear Forces is broken into sections dealing with Land-Based Strategic Nuclear Forces; Marine Strategic Nuclear Forces; Air-Based Strategic Nuclear Forces; Operation, Storage and Transportation of Nuclear Munitions; Earth Remote Sensing Facilities; Development of Nuclear Charges By VNIIEF (nuclear weapons development authority); Academician E.I. Zababakhin Russia's Research Institute of Applied Physics-Developer of Nuclear Weapons; Russia's Research Institute of Automatics; Topogeodetic Support; and Radiation and Chemical Safety at Nuclear Installations and While Carrying Out Maintenance of Nuclear Weapons and Missiles.
Each of these sections is subdivided into chapters, each with detailed illustrations, graphs, tables of information and the like. But Strategic Nuclear Forces emerges as much more than a catalog. Its easy reading style – each page has columns of Cyrillic and English text alongside each other – helps provide real understanding of the complexity and structure of present Russian strategic capabilities and the historical developments which went into building them.
The fact that Russian authorities participated in the production of the book speaks well of developments in Moscow. International concern over the supposed "collapse" of Russian control over nuclear weapons with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 can now be tempered with an understanding of what the Russian Government is doing to control; its nuclear assets. And far from serving as a blueprint from which other aspirant nuclear powers can develop their own nuclear weapons programs, Strategic Nuclear Forces serves as a reminder of just how complex, costly and arduous a road it is to develop a comprehensive, balanced strategic force structure.
In his introduction to the Land-Based force section, the Commander-in- Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, Col-Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, noted that Russia's strategic nuclear forces "provide a 'missile shield' enabling us to reform the Armed Forces weakened by (the) unfavorable economic situation in the country and raise them to a qualitatively new level".
The Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) account for two-thirds of the Russian nuclear capability in terms of warheads and launch vehicles.
In this section of the book, as in all the sections, the Soviet and Russian systems are listed with their local nomenclature, but with the Western/NATO designations also appended, so that the international community has a comprehensible frame of reference. As well, the book gives timeline graphs on the development and introduction of the systems, so that the history of the strategic evolution of the USSR's and Russia's forces can be better understood.
All the sections are prefaced by very detailed overviews by the commanders of the various forces, commands and facilities. These give the reader excellent overviews of the systems and technologies, making the more hardware-or science-oriented chapters which follow much more comprehensible.
This outstanding volume is one of the most important documents to emerge from Russia in the past decade. It is absolutely essential as a key to understanding Russia's strategic and military position today. It is even important for those developing nations who have no particular nuclear interest because it gives a new appreciation of where Russia is going, strategically: beyond the present difficulties. The following volumes on other aspects of the Russian forces will be eagerly awaited.
Buy this book immediately. – GRC
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